The memorialization of empire in postcolonial Portugal: identity politics and the commodification of history

• Autor(a) principal: Peralta, Elsa
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/58574
• topic: Public memory; Portuguese empire; Nationalism; Cosmopolitanism; Com-modification; Memória pública; Império Português; Nacionalismo; Cosmopolitismo; Comodificação

The entire experience of modern imperialism has profoundly shaped Europe- an national identities in ways that continue to matter in postimperial times. This is also true of Portugal; as the first and the most enduring of the European colonial empires, its end did not erase the self-image of the country as an imperial nation. Although re- fashioned in a matter of style and content, major public representations of the nation’s collective identity remain anchored in the memory of empire. This official memory com- bines a strong emphasis on the period of the “Maritime Discoveries” with the represen- tation of Portugal as the pioneer of cultural dialogue on a global scale and of the Portu- guese as “inventors” of the modern world. In this article, I will address some examples of the way in which Portugal’s imperial history has been memorialized to convey the coun- try’s “brand image,” for the purposes of both identity politics and the tourism industry.